Max looked past the many arenas of the eighth monolith toward the enormous door standing at the far end, and then he sighed.
"I just spent seven hundred Bronze Marks on the Seventh Shadow, and now I have to gather them all over again."
He glanced down at the Bronze Mark on his palm and shook his head.
[212]
For the first time, Max truly understood why some people stayed inside the Ten Shadows Trial for years.
The difficulty of the shadows was only part of the problem, because every monolith demanded more Bronze Marks than the one before it.
A challenger couldn't simply push forward on strength alone. They needed enough marks to keep entering the shadow trials, and a single failure immediately made the next attempt that much harder to afford.
By the later monoliths, the required amount had grown enormous.
Max finally saw how people could spend months or even years in this place before leaving partway through or getting expelled after failing the Tenth Shadow.
